Women & Dogs

A Personal History from Marilyn to Madonna

by JUDITH WATT and PETER DYER

Jean Harlow doted on dogs, and a Pomeranian, Elkhound and Great Dane, were her three most trusted companions.With men she was more equivocal. ‘When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,’ she quipped.

Sara Jessica-Parker played a talking stray dog who takes over a household in A.R. Gurney’s ‘Sylvia’, modelling the part on her own Border collie, Sally. ‘I’ve never seen a dog portrait in films or the stage that quite matches the truth and wit of Ms Parker's performance,’ raved The New York Times.

Pinker, Virginia Woolf’s golden cocker spaniel, was a present from Vita Sackville-West. He featured in Woolf's diaries and inspired Flush, her story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Paw prints covered many pages of the writer’s manuscripts.

When she married in 1917, Dorothy Parker bought herself a Boston terrier, whom she called Woodrow Wilson (the then president), but she was too busy writing and partying with the Algonquin Round Tablers to house-train him. The situation got so bad that the floorboards of her flat began to buckle.

Jazz legend Billie Holiday had a number of dogs but her best known companion was a boxer called Mister. ‘He was the best hang-out dog on earth,’ band member Big Stump informed her biographer Donald Clarke.‘He would sit backstage where he could hear Lady’s voice and as long as he heard her voice he was happy’. It was said that Holiday shared everything, including heroin, with Mister.

Queen Elizabeth II’s first corgi was called Dookie – the late Queen Mother’s joke as this was Wallis Simpson’s pet name for the Duke of Windsor. The Queen once spotted a policeman kicking a royal corgi after he’d been nipped; she sharply informed him that if he ever kicked a dog again she would bite him.

Women & Dogs is a personal history of dog people including: WOMEN & DOGS is a personal history of dog people including: Frida Kahlo, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rita Hayworth, Radclyffe Hall, Ingrid Bergman, Janis Joplin, Edith Cavell, Maria Callas, Madonna, Sara Bernhardt, Katie England, Queen Alexandra, Lauren Bacall, Josephine Baker, Karen Blixen, Enid Blyton, Clara Bow, Eleanor Bron, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Barbara Cartland, Coco Chanel, Colette, Joan Collins, Jilly Cooper, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Queen Elizabeth II, Dolores del Rio, Indira Ghandi, Ava Gardner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Doris Day, Jean Harlow, Audrey Hepburn, Debbie Harry, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Edie Falco, Jodie Kidd, Charlize Theron, Billie Holiday, Tama Janowitz, Helen Keller, Jacquie Kennedy, Peggy Guggenheim, Germaine Greer, Mistinguett, Sam Taylor Wood, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Sharon Osbourne, Martina Navratilova, Beatrix Potter, Renée Zellweger, Vita Sackville-West, Valerie Singleton, Dodie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Duchess of Windsor, Barbara Woodhouse, Queen Victoria, Serena Williams, Tallulah Bankhead.

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